Music Commons^™

Postmarked 2022, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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Postmarked was a publication started during the COVID-19 pandemic by three RISD architecture students. The first issue has the theme of "sonder" and contains student writing and artwork on postcards that deal with this theme.

V.1 Spring 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2022 issue contains writings divided into five categories: ecosystems, homes, archaeologies, explorations, and new constructions. Writings touch on urban ecology, wilderness, physical and mental health, identity, and other topics. Visual work is also present in this issue.

A Festival Of Form: Score, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

"A Festival of Form" was both an event at Bridwell and Perkins School of Theology and a conceptual piece of music that lasted several days. In this rendering, the "piece of music" was articulated in a fluid combination of activities that included works by other composers, including John Cage. The activities involved--from lectures, conversations, and meals to actual performances of both short works and especially the world-record breaking rendition of "Organ2/ASLSP" played by Christopher Anderson--comprise the entirety of "A Festival of Form" as performance piece. The challenge of this work is that unlike nearly any other music, it is purposely …

V.1 Winter 2022, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2022 issue is a special edition "art writing capsule," with three zines that each feature a student writing about a work of art, and a fourth zine with an editor's note and postscript. Writing 1 is Angelina Rogers on Salman Toor's "Two Boys with a Dog," Writing 2 is Maxwell Fertik on Shahzia Sikander's "Epistrophe," and Writing 3 is Sabo Kpade on Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's "Any Number of Preoccupations."

V.1 Fall 2021, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2021 issue is formatted as a zine and contains notes from students displayed on their phones and otherwise, along with student creative writing.

The Emotional Illusion Of Music: Contemporary Western Musical Aesthetics In Dialogue With Ancient Eastern Philosophy, Yin Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project aims to examine whether music has an emotional nature. I use the ancient Chinese text Music Has No Grief or Joy to construct three arguments for the illusion view, according to which music has no emotional nature and the emotional appearances of music are illusory. These arguments highlight representational inconstancy, expressive incapability, and evocative underdetermination as three ways to problematize the idea that music has an emotional nature. I draw on the Confucian tradition to formulate three responses to the illusion view from representational reliability, expressive sincerity, and evocative appropriateness. These responses are shown to be inadequate. To …

The Glob, Spring 2021, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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The Glob was a one-off student newspaper created for the course Words, Images and Ideas, ILLUS 3412-01, taught by Ernest A. Bryant III. Students contributed 1-2 pages each of writing and images on topics such as COVID-19, fashion and style, risograph printing, and more.

Günther Anders’S Epitaph For Aikichi Kuboyama, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era …

Object-Oriented Musicology: Some Implications Of Graham Harman's Philosophy For Music Theory, History, And Criticism, Eric Taxier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation brings the ideas of the philosopher Graham Harman (b. 1968) into a musicological context. His “object-oriented ontology” is widely known in continental philosophy, but it has not yet entered rigorous contact with musicology. Certain factors pose difficulties at first glance, such as Harman’s focus on metaphysical issues (originating in his critique of Martin Heidegger) and his rehabilitation of the widely criticized concept of aesthetic autonomy. But these are also sources of novelty that could make an object-oriented encounter with musicology fruitful. In the first chapter, I outline the main features of Harman’s thought. He critiques assumptions about the …

Afrosonic Noise: A Transnational Black Feminist Musicological Study Of Global Black Joy In Black North American Rock Music And Afro Argentinian Music Performance., Jerika M Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I have decided that my academic mission, at this juncture at least, is to find common links between 2 groups of people that have come to know themselves through paralleling but colonially different environments. Perhaps it is wise for me to explore the similarities between Afro Argentine Black Music and African North American Music in closer ethnomusicological detail using feminist praxis—after all both communities are part of the African Diaspora and producing Black music. I do this by reconstructing a very limited genealogy of Black Femme’s and their contribution to their respective musical communities. I draw parallels between the global …

V.1 Spring Pandemic 2020-2021, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2020-Spring 2021 issue contains articles on the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on RISD, students engaging with nature, racial and gender identity, art exhibitions and contemporary artists, D+M student work, and other topics of interest to students.

V.1 Winter 2020, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Winter 2020 issue contains articles on cultural touchstones, family memories, reality tv in paradise, and cultural artifacts in Italy, along with student creative writing.

V.1 Fall 2019, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2019 issue has a theme of mobility and contains articles on Providence's Superman Building, Quechua textiles and the Mexican Revolution, Asian queer identities, and the best albums of the 2010s, along with personal essays, creative writing, and other student work.

Thelonious Monk's Prototypical Style: Close And Distant Readings Of Jazz Stylings, Connor Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thelonious Monk’s style has been considered non-conformist, modernist, technically stilted, intentionally unconventional, even incompetent. His performing is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, by what metric is his performing idiosyncratic, or, framed another way, in what ways do Thelonious Monk’s performances deviate from the prototypical performance? Situated within family resemblance theories of prototypicality, I utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to categorize jazz solos based on their melodic usage of standard jazz language (novel corpus of 530 jazz solo improvisations). Using these distant readings to determine which solos are prototypical, I perform a close reading of these prototypical solos …

Sunésis: Evolving Aesthetic Discourse In Traditional Music Practices In Ireland, Nollaig Ó Fiongháile

Research Theses

The enquiry ‘Súnesis’ investigates aesthetic awareness in traditional music practices in Ireland and seeks to evolve an aesthetic discourse with the practices at hand.Súnesis undertakes a critical examination of a suite of performances from contemporary and traditional folk music practices in Ireland. Engaging an interpretative model evolved by Paul Ricoeur, the author designs a dimensional pathway to articulate the modes of consciousness and aesthetic awareness at work in the creative act.

It is proposed that a rethinking of traditional folk music is required, beyond the disciplinary, geographical or political boundaries more typically conceived in music studies. With an alternate …

V.1 Spring 2019, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Spring 2019 issue contains articles on studio practice, a Sculpture studio that uses Fort Adams as an installation site, Harvard Art Museum's pigment collection, a student's recollections of the British Club in Bahrain, creativity in Sri Lanka, gender agnosticism/transgenderism, RISD Provost Ken Kleinman, Vice-President of Social Equity and Inclusion Matthew Shenoda, reflections from the workshops "Urgency Lab," the Sunrise Movement, a RISD Museum performance "Strand," a counter-protest to the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, religion …

Musical “Covers” And The Culture Industry: From Antiquity To The Age Of Digital Reproducibility, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay foregrounds “covers” of popular recorded songs as well as male and female desire, in addition to Nietzsche’s interest in composition, together with his rhythmic analysis of Ancient Greek as the basis of what he called the “spirit of music” with respect to tragedy. The language of “sonic branding” allows a discussion of what Günther Anders described as the self-creation of the mass consumer but also a reflection on the ghostly time-space of music in the broadcast world. A brief allusion to Rilke complements a similarly brief reference to Jankelevitch’s “ineffable.”

V.1 Fall 2018, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2018 issue contains articles on art writing and the place of the self, student reflections on politics, practice, and dogma across generations. Articles look back on historic manuscripts, to past projects and recent events, and forward. This issue's content presents the various expressions of truth that artists and designers work within.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

The Broadsheet September 29, 2017, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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The Broadsheet was a short-lived student newspaper published in 2017. The September 29, 2017 issue features articles on an "ethical consciousness post-Trump," improving critiques, the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, the Social Equity and Inclusion Action Plan, the smoking ban at Kennedy Plaza, statue conservation, new programming at the library, an offensive incident involving a graphic designer and a sign language interpreter, and other items of interest.

Inculturation Of Liturgical Music In The Roman Catholic Church Of Igbo Land: A Compositional Study, Benedict Nwabugwu Agbo

Journal of Global Catholicism

A study of inculturation, composition and music among Catholics in Igboland, Nigeria. The article insects with contemporary discussions of inculturation/enculturation after Vatican II and the recommendation of St. John Paul II in his Ecclesia in Africa.

The Broadsheet May 6, 2017, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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The Broadsheet was a short-lived student newspaper published in 2017. The May 6, 2017 issue was the first and contained articles on the Social Equity Action plan developed in the wake of the "Not Your Token" protests, random facts about RISD, Project Open Door (POD), faculty member Jung Joon Lee, previous student newspapers from the RISD Archives, the European Honors Program, facts about the RISD student body, a student music club on campus, how Mike Fink saved Carr Haus, and other items of interest.

-Isms 2017, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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-ISMS: Exploring the Intersectionality of Identities was a publication that accompanied the RISD Global Initiative 2017 exhibit of the same name. The exhibit explored the intersections of identity and art and featured pieces that were selected for critique by visiting artist and MLK Series keynote speaker Emory Douglas. This publication contains images of student artwork from the exhibit along with essays and other text.

V.1 2017-2018, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The 2017-2018 issue contains articles on the Nature Lab, food and design, the role of writing in architecture, and an interview with the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar along with the comic "Printer Prosthetics" at NYABF by Elaine Lopez.

Review Of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, Jonathan L. Friedmann

Between the Species

Review of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, by David Rothenberg. This book proposes that the human sense of rhythm derived in part from insect sounds.

Art As Display, Frank M. Boardman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art is essentially a type of display. As an activity, art is what we do when we display objects with certain intentions. As a set of objects, art is all of those things that are displayed for those purposes. The artworld is the social atmosphere that surrounds this particular activity of display. And a history of art is an evolving narrative of change in the practice of this sort of display.

Specifically, to focus for convenience on art as a set of objects, this is what we can call the “displayed-object thesis”:

x is a work of art iff: (a) …

Kind Of Borrowed, Kind Of Blue, P.D. Magnus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

In late 2014, the jazz combo Mostly Other People Do the Killing released "Blue", an album which is a note-for-note remake of Miles Davis' 1959 landmark album "Kind of Blue". MOPDtK (to abbreviate the band's cumbersome name) transcribed all of the solos and performed them with meticulous care so as to produce a recorded album that replicates, as much as they could, the sound of the original. This is a thought experiment made actual, the kind of doppelgänger which philosophers routinely just imagine. I explore some of the ontological and aesthetic puzzles which the album poses. I argue that what …

V.1 2016-2017 Supplement, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The 2016-2017 Supplement issue contains handwritten answers on post-its to the question "What feels urgent to you in your studio? In your life? In the world?" These post-its were written at a grad-student gathering on the day after the 2016 US Presidential election, scanned and printed as a zine the next day, and distributed at open studios the day after that.

V.1 2016-2017, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The 2016-2017 issue contains articles on Kara Walker, Women's March, "Look at Art, Get Paid" program, #pizzagate, the Mutual Encounters exhibition, and smartphones.

We Begin When We Finish When We Begin, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

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We Begin When We Finish When We Begin was a graduate student publication published in 2015. It featured essays, interviews, and student work dealing with themes of identity, geography, academics, and student life. Students as well as faculty contributed.